Sitting a few steps away from a black marble memorial to his friend Mickey who was stabbed to death two years ago at age 15, Ronald Ramos looks bewildered when asked why he didn't take the SAT, seek financial aid and apply to college after graduating from high school.
"Parents don't know what the system is here," he says at Georgetown South, a Latino neighborhood in Manassas, Va. "We don't know what to do."
Hispanics such as Ramos are the fastest-growing component of America's workforce. The country will need their taxes to help pay the Social Security benefits of retirees and their skills to fill jobs of Baby Boomers leaving the labor force. Today, Ramos, who is 18 and of Mexican descent, is looking for temporary work to help pay for college. If he fails, he risks joining the more than 80 percent of Latinos ages 25 and older who don't have a bachelor's degree.
The lack of educational attainment among Hispanics is one of the biggest crises in the American labor force with far-reaching implications for the economy. Without more education, Latinos won't be able to fill higher-paying jobs, contributing to already widening U.S. income disparity. Without higher incomes, they won't join the consumers that propel the earnings of U.S. companies ranging from Ford Motor Co. to Verizon Communications. The unemployment rate for Latinos was 10 percent in October, compared with 7.9 percent nationally.
Workforce needs
"You can't meet our national goals and our workforce needs without having a tactical plan for Latinos," says Deborah Santiago, vice president of policy and research for Excelencia in Education, a Washington, D.C., research organization that focuses on education of Latinos. "This is just a factual statement given what the current population numbers are."
Only 14 percent of Hispanics ages 25 and older had a bachelor's degree or higher in 2011 compared with 51 percent for Asians, 20 percent for African Americans and 34 percent for whites, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Authorized program
Of the 47 million new workers entering the labor force between 2010 and 2050, a projected 37.6 million, or 80 percent, will be Latino, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report. Their share of the workforce will grow to 18.6 percent by 2020 and to 30 percent in 2050, doubling from 15 percent in 2010, according to the bureau.
That means by the end of the decade, about 1 in 5 available workers for companies such as Citigroup, Apple or General Motors will have last names like Ramos, Castillo or Perez.
Immigration trends could change. The net flow of immigrants from Mexico, the largest source of immigration to the United States, began slowing five years ago, according to the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, D.C.
Latino households
Still, companies will count on growing Latino household formation to sell their products.
"If you don't reach out to the Hispanic consumer, you cannot make it," says Alvaro Cabal, Ford Motor Co.'s manager in charge of Latino communications, in Dallas. "From the iPhone to the Android, from cars to houses to sausages, that is the reality. It is going to be a huge population."
Ford began to see the increase in Latino car buyers years ago and structured sales and marketing efforts toward them, he says. It's paying off. The automaker's light-duty vehicle sales volume to Hispanics rose about 25 percent this year through June compared with a 9.7 percent increase in total sales.
Extra workers
"In a growing economy, we will need extra workers," says Richard Fry, a senior research associate at the Pew Hispanic Center. "And more than half of the new workers employers will work with will be Latino. Without a four-year college degree, they are going to have a difficult time in those upper-echelon managerial jobs."
Fry's research shows Latinos making some gains. The number of 18- to 24-year-olds was a record 16.5 percent share of all college enrollments in 2011 compared with 11 percent in 2006. High-school completion rates reached 76 percent last year, also the highest on record. Associate degrees obtained by Hispanics rose to 112,211 in 2010, up from 97,921 the previous year and 51,563 in 2000, his research shows.
Yet a conversation with Ramos shows the numerous obstacles to getting through high school and into college. Before his friend Miguel "Mickey" Hernandez died of a stab wound to the chest in November 2010, gangs prowled the neighborhoods, and their members were also in the schools, he says.
'Really tough'
"You had to watch your back. It was really tough," he says, adding that the violence now seems to have subsided.
He says he lives in a house with seven other people. Finding a place to study was difficult. His brother is a drummer. His sister has two small children. His family doesn't have Internet service, making his high school studies and any college application, financial aid and job-search process difficult.
"There wasn't enough money to pay for it," Ramos says. "I would stay after school or go to the public library or to a friend's house" to access class information online.
He didn't know how to pay for college or even get transportation to attend, which is why he didn't apply before graduating high school. He says he "never understood anything" about federal student financial-aid programs and the forms are confusing.
Wage benefits
The wage benefits that come with higher education aren't known by him or his friends, he says. Long-range planning and saving is difficult when his parents struggle to pay monthly bills.
"They just break their backs and get upset because they don't have any money," he says. His mother is a homemaker and his dad works for a construction company.
Now a few months out of high school, he says his dream is to spend two years at a community college then transfer to a four-year university, studying music and fine arts. He has taken courses in tax preparation and needs a job to help pay for fees and books.
Source: http://feeds.sfgate.com/click.phdo?i=a91869742c41edddb1be1e32eee3b28f
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